Word: webern
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Webern's Music: Reaction...
...certain sense, Webern's music was a reaction to the nineteenth century elements that flooded Berg's music and kept on pushing into Schoenberg's. And so a Webern score is extremely economical with notes: most of the pieces are short (some last only a few seconds); virtually every work is full of silence; the sounds heard are frequently very soft and are clearly the result of delicate calculation. There are few mass effects--rather, the attention is concentrated upon a succession of single tones. There is formal economy, too: the care Webern spent in organizing his structures finally resulted...
...spare, subtle language of Webern's music must have seemed extraordinarily novel and refreshing to twelve-tone composers, while his concern for highly schematized structure seemed to be the necessary concomitant to an idiom so unlike Western music. The post-Webern school, as its name implies, has carried these methods a good deal further. There was ample evidence of the wide spectrum of this music at a concert held in Paine Hall on Mar. 5, devoted largely to the post-Webern representation at Harvard, which raised some hard questions about the aims and future of advanced music...
...demands on the attention not usually required of an audience, Christion Wolff's music was perhaps the hardest to grasp. There were two pieces, both for two pianos, the second running almost 15 minutes. From the surface of the music it is easy enough to catalogue the extensions of Webern's devices: only a few notes are played at a time; these are usually very soft (or else very loud); there is constant preoccupation with color: most of the music is very high or low, piano strings are plucked with the fingers, there are elaborate pedal effects...
Wolff's solution involves a number of techniques, the most important of which deals with an extension of the row idea. In Schoenberg and Webern only pitch is set in order. Now the concept of "total organization" puts other musical materials into a row: dynamics, time, tonecolor all have their own rows, frequently connected with one another...